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This infrequently used blog has awakened for a timely guest post from Eddie Hatcher.

I’m a racist. There is no known cure, so best I can hope for is to minimize the symptoms. I’ve struggled my whole life to do just that, but I still can’t help but feel partially responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death. I carry this guilt because nothing I do is enough to combat the system I once gladly took part in.

I grew up in a small North Carolina town surrounded by farms and factories. What I learned about racism, I learned hanging out in hunt clubs, on farms, in country stores, and in gun shops. We often talked about race, but never about racism. Everyone knew that racism stopped existing after Integration. In our minds, we were not discriminating against anyone because of their skin color; we were simply describing the way people acted, their mannerisms, language, dress, etc. Nothing about that seemed racist. Sure, the N word was thrown around occasionally, but black people use that word to describe themselves, so we thought it was OK.

Looking back, I think the worst part may have been the “justified” fear. While the words of wisdom demanded that I not talk to strangers, a part of growing up was learning which strangers were safe and which were dangerous. Of all the strangers out there, none were more important to avoid than black men. If you see a black man, check for your exits. Make sure your friends and siblings are close, as they might not have noticed the black man yet. Whatever you do, don’t talk to them. The more of a “homie” they appear to be, the more dangerous they are.

It’s hard to pinpoint all the things that led to me questioning the mentality I grew up in, but I clearly remember a critical turning point in elementary school. It was Black History Month and our librarian, an intelligent, well-spoken woman, was talking to the class about Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. Like a good white kid, I was brazenly proclaiming my disdain for him. In a display of patience that was no less than heroic, she waited until the class had dispersed and she sat down to have a chat with me. Her first question was simple and direct: “why don’t you like Dr. King?” Since “racism” was not a possibility in my mind, I justified myself by claiming that it was his methods. She continued asking questions about why peaceful marches and civil disobedience bothered me so until the only answers left were, “I don’t know, just because.”

I will never forget the frustration I felt after that conversation 20-some years ago. It burned in me as I scrutinized her questions, searching for logical explanations for my disdain. All my teachers loved me and I got A’s in every subject, yet this librarian had completely stumped me. I thought about those questions for days, weeks. I am still thinking about them today.

I used to think that conversation was the beginning of the end of me being a racist, but now I know that is incorrect.

Of all the speculation of what happened the day that Trayvon Martin was shot dead, one detail of the killer’s story that I do not question is his claim that he was afraid. No doubt he has learned, like me, to be afraid of black men. Florida law says that Zimmerman had a right to stand his ground and defend himself if a “reasonable person” would fear for their life in that situation. No reasonable grown man with a gun would be afraid of a skinny minor, but a racist person like myself would.

But unlike Zimmerman, I take ownership of my fear, my racism. I’m not going to shoot someone because their skin color makes me afraid. I’m going to do the opposite. When I see the “black man in a dark alley” and that childhood fear pops out, I push it down to replace it with a smile and a nod. When people cultivate that fear, innocent children die.

Now that the verdict has been read, I can’t help but be filled with personal guilt. For years I have struggled to own racist upbringing and I have spoken out when people around me say things that demean cultures they know little about. I guess I hoped that my efforts had combined with those of millions of other Americans and that we were moving toward a better world. Maybe I didn’t do enough. Maybe I should have gone to more marches, should have gone to law school, should have been a school librarian. Seeing Trayvon Martin’s murderer go free leaves me feeling hopeless, as though no amount of effort as an adult can undo the damage I did as a child.

I’m like an alcoholic trying to change my life. I’ve walked through the door, but there are 11 more steps and I have no idea what any of them are.

(Just a terminology note here: I can’t bring myself to refer to this as a gender pay “gap,” although that’s the most-used description. Gaps are something you can step over. 3 months and 17 days worth of work is not a gap. $400,000 is not a gap. I’m going to call it the gender pay chasm. If we are going to get to the other side of it, we have some serious work to do.)

I assumed that, because I work in the nonprofit sector, things would be better. After all, nonprofits are run by nice people who are generally striving to make the world a better place. Workers in the nonprofit sector are more than half female. Surely, the disparity between what men and women make would be less.

But last week, Gov. Scott Walker pissed me off enough that I felt motivated to do a little research. What I found in three simple Google searches shocked me. (As a politically active feminist with almost a decade of all-women’s education under my belt, I did not expect to find that things were even worse than I thought they were.) Here’s a bit of what I thought I knew, and what I learned about women, our paychecks, and the world of nonprofits:

Myth #1: Things are getting better.

Whether or not you work at a nonprofit, the chasm between what women make and what men make for similar work is not getting smaller. (Informative infographic here.) College-educated women have seen the gap between their pay and the pay of their male classmates hold steady at round 25% since the mid-1990’s. In 2011, that translated to $998/week median pay for women with a college degree, and $1,332 a week for men with a college degree. Women without a college degree had a narrower gap by all of 2% – their median salary was $554 in a week, and men with a similar education made $730.

Women make, on average, 77 cents to every dollar made by a man (or 62 cents if you’re an African American woman, or a measly 54 cents if you’re a Latino woman.) If that doesn’t sound like a big difference, add in some zeros.

To top it all off, Governor Walker’s incredibly ignorant remarks (including, “You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious.”)sound a lot like something someone said to my mother in her first job interview out of graduate school in the mid 1970’s.

In a study of nonprofits in the rural south, Rural Support Partners found that although women lead nonprofits more often than men (56% of respondents’ organizations were led by women, 44% by men), women make less money than men in those positions. Similar trends persist nationwide. According to the 2011 Guidestar report, women may make up a sizeable portion of nonprofit leadership, but they get paid less to lead, and they are far less likely to hold leadership positions in larger nonprofits, where salaries are higher.

To top it off, we may have leadership positions, but we still don’t have more of the real decision-making power in our field. Women account for 43 percent of the board seats among all nonprofits but hold only 33 percent of the board seats at nonprofits with incomes of $25 million or more, according to the White House Project.

Myth #3: Gender wage discrimination happens in other places. It doesn’t happen in nonprofits, where we’re all good people.

The gender wage chasm is very present in the world of nonprofit compensation. As a general rule, the larger the organization, the wider the gap. According to Guidestar’s 2011 compensation report, women nonprofit CEOs made 13.4 percent less than men at nonprofits organizations with budgets of $250-$500K. At organizations with budgets of more than $50M, they made 24.6 percent less.

For organizations with a budget over $5 million, women executives earned an average yearly income of $401,000—a generous salary for the nonprofit sector, but one that pales in comparison to men executives’ $621,000. That means these women earn just over 64 cents to a man’s dollar. At small nonprofits, the gap was less pronounced but still alive and well: Women executives earned an average wage of $84,000 compared to men’s $100,000….[T]he greater the organization’s budget, the greater the wage inequality.…

That Rural Support Partners study found that nonprofits in the rural south paid “$48,738 on average for female executives, $60,468 for males.” That’s a difference of $11,730 a year for the same work and the same level of responsibility.

A 2011 Philanthropy Journal study of fundraisers had similar findings: “Average salaries for male fundraisers totaled $92,540 in the U.S. compared to $70,614 for female fundraisers in the U.S.. With the exception of 2005, average salaries for men consistently have exceeded those for women by $20,000 for the 10 years in which the survey has been conducted.”

I’ve been told time and time again that women are bad negotiators. There’s a general acknowledgement that women are socialized to be agreeable and passive, so we fall short when it comes to the hard-nosed money-making self-interest skill set. The solution most often presented is for us to take responsibility for learning better negotiation skills. I’m the first to admit, this made sense to me. I have never felt comfortable negotiating salaries. It may be the one area of my life, except for maybe family vacations, where I could ever be accused of not being very assertive.

Men are four times more likely to negotiate a first salary than women.

Men are eight times more likely than women to negotiate their starting salary and benefits.

Women ask for raises or promotions 85 percent less often than their male counterparts.

20 percent of women (22 million people) say they never negotiate at all, even though they recognize negotiation as appropriate and even necessary.

2.5 times more women than men said they feel “a great deal of apprehension” about negotiation.

But it turns out, surprise, surprise, that the people being discriminated against may not be responsible for the problem. Women, next time you are in a salary negotiation and you feel like you need to back off so that people still like you, it may not be because you have bad negotiating skills. It may be because you are right.

In 2007, Harvard researchers Bowles and Babcock studied how women fared in negotiations about pay. The Washington Post explained:

[T]his study found that women’s reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more — the perception was that women who asked for more were “less nice”….”What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not,” Bowles said. “They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not.”…While both men and women were penalized for negotiating, Bowles found that the negative effect for women was more than twice as large as that for men.

So next time you think that people aren’t going to like you because you advocated for fair compensation, you can get some small comfort out of realizing that you probably aren’t thinking that because you are too weak and you can’t get the patriarchy out of your head. You may be thinking that because you are smart and perceptive.

So now what?

So here’s what my research taught me: as a woman with a graduate degree in the nonprofit sector in 2012, I’m not somehow immune to pay discrimination. I am likely to face even more pressure to be self-sacrificing than my male colleagues, and I’ll probably get paid less, relative to them, than I would be in the for-profit sector (and certainly less than in the government sector.) It’s that old Victorian “Angel in the House” myth come back to haunt us, except now, it’s the Angel in the Nonprofit Office. Most of us do the work that we do because we love it, because we want to make the world better, because we want to be on the right side of history. But right now, for many of us, the price we have to pay is being trapped in the same injustices we’re trying to fight.

So to my nonprofit colleagues: Let’s do something about it. And no, I’m not talking about us ladies brushing up on our negotiating skills. One thing we can do is establish clear, transparent, accountable pay structures. According to the National Women’s Law Center, there’s good evidence to show that pay secrecy contributes to pay inequality. As nonprofits, we’re accountable to our funders and those we serve when it comes to our finances. Let’s be accountable to each other too. If nonprofits develop pay structures that don’t rely on one person’s judgement, no matter how nice or well-meaning that person may be, we can build fairness into the system and build discrimination out of it. There are some great examples out there of relatively transparent and objective pay structures. (For a start, check out Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the Center for Participatory Change.) Nothing’s going to be perfect, but, the way things are now, improving isn’t that hard to do.

Also, you could sign this petition from the National Organization for Women asking the President to make sure employees can discuss their salaries, and join your local feminist organization so that you can sign the next petition/go to the next march/talk to your Senator about the next bill/etc.

This is not something than can wait. We’re not getting back the 108 days worth of compensation we lost between January 1, 2011 and now. We’re not getting back the health insurance, retirement accounts, childcare, vacations, good books, take-out dinners after long days of work, graduate degrees, local food, plane tickets, new tires, craft beers, or any of the other things we could have bought with the more than $10,000 each of us, on average, didn’t get paid last year just because we are women. The Scott Walkers of the world are working hard to make sure it’s even worse next year. Enough is enough. Who’s with me?

Ok, people. I’ve had enough. It is none of your business what color my bra is. It is none of your business if I have, and I quote, “touched my boobs today.” *

(The answer is no. My fibrocystic boobs pretty much always feel like big lumps of cancer, and they hurt this time of month. Too much info? Then you shouldn’t have asked.)

Cancer is not a fashion statement. It is not cute. It is not sexy. Chemo is not cute. Major surgery is not sexy. Dying isn’t either. Losing people I love does not make me want to talk about my underwear.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand the importance of raising awareness. Women should not be ashamed of their bodies or what happens to them. I understand the importance of a good marketing campaign. If you’ve got something important to say, it helps to say it well. I have no problem with a campaign that makes women facing breast cancer feel supported. I have no problem with a campaign that makes what was once a shameful disease into something we can face together. I don’t even have a problem with laughing at the things that make us afraid, or by making a movement for change into something joyful.

But this whole “let’s all raise awareness, and it will be really cute because the boys won’t know what we mean,” or “let’s raise awareness by making double entendres – ‘Touch your boobs.’ Get it? It’s, like, funny!” is not amusing. For one thing, it pretends that if we can all band together, all do monthly breast self-exams, all buy enough pink shit, we can actually stop people from dying.

There is currently no scientific evidence from randomized trials that breast self-exam (BSE) saves lives or enables women to detect breast cancer at earlier stages. In addition, there are some data that show that BSE greatly increases the number of benign lumps detected, resulting in increased anxiety, physician visits, and unnecessary biopsies.

So we might not know for sure the best ways to detect and treat cancer. We might save lives with this, we might not.

We do know that there are things that cause cancer. Living near hazardous waste sites. Working in factories with petrochemicals. Bovine growth hormone. Vinyl. Some pesticides and insecticides. Some water bottles and baby bottles and canned foods. Household cleaners. Cosmetics. Radiation. Even laptops, which means maybe I shouldn’t be writing this.

How about lives? Can we save those too?

So, in addition to not wanting to talk about my underwear, I would not like to buy a vinyl pink ribbon magnet to put on my carcinogen-producing car. I would not like to buy a pink teddy bear made with plastic yarn in a sweatshop. I would not like to buy a pink t-shirt that invites people to concentrate on my breasts that is made with cotton picked by workers exposed to carcinogenic chemicals and manufactured with carcinogenic dyes by women with no health insurance in machiladoras. I would not like to buy pink cosmetics filled with chemicals that jack with my hormones, or buy pink-lidded yogurt made from milk from cows fed non-organic grain and shot up with rbGH.

I would especially not like to raise money for breast cancer research and see that money go to companies that sponsor breast cancer awareness events, manufacture breast cancer drugs or equipment, and, at the same time, make things that cause cancer. (And finding a company that makes breast cancer treatment drugs that doesn’t also make carcinogenic chemicals is so hard it will make you sick in the metaphorical sense too.)

So go ahead and do whatever screening makes you comfortable. Talk to your doctor. Talk to your friends. Talk to the press, if you’re brave. But do not, do not, do NOT make this into one big sexy excuse to make crude jokes, sell shit, and spread misinformation.

If we really want to stop cancer, we need to go to the root causes.Finding a cure sounds flashy, but we could save lives right now, without any more research at all. There are lives we could have saved that we didn’t. We need to read labels and make smart choices about what we buy. We need to make sure all women have access to great health care. We need to fight radiation and carcinogens and corporate pink-washing of health information.

This is hard. Way harder than buying a t-shirt, and rather less fun, because no corporation is spending millions of dollars on an advertising campaign to make it fun and easy for you to hold them accountable. We need to do it anyway. The lives of people we love depend on it. We do not need a corporate sponsor or cheap puns to love each other and take care of each other and make change in this messed-up world. If you want to protect my health, stop talking about my bra and my boobs, and start talking about things that matter.

PS – This post comes with a gigantor disclaimer. I know a good number women who have found the pink campaigns to be an source of support, or at least the occasional laugh, during their battle with cancer, or during a loved one’s struggle. Also, some really fabulous women asked me to post my bra color. Just because I hate pink doesn’t mean I don’t love the hell out of you. But you know that already.